Holland by bike - 5

Our days merge together as we cycle from one location to another.

We decide we need to pause for a day in order to let our legs recover and also because a mini heatwave has arrived, burning sunshine all day long and afternoon temperatures in the mid twenties (celsius). Two nights in succession in a bed and breakfast hotel seem to do the trick, especially when the room faces out onto a magnificent woodland. The hotel caters for different travellers and in the parking area at the front there are charging stations for electric cars and alongside these these are a bank of charging sockets for use by electric bikes, something we have never ever seen before. But of course it is obvious that this should be available for guests arriving on bikes since electric bikes are very common here, perhaps even more common than back home. We are constantly being passed by riders, often elderly, on their tall Dutch bikes, as they hum effortlessly along. We are slow movers compared to most. This is a country where the facilities for cyclists always go much further than we expect. We have not passed by a restaurant or a bar that does not have a cycle rack outside or close by.

Our rather casual attitude to route finding (adding a start and finish point into the Google maps app and telling it we are cycling) often brings us other surprises. We squeeze ourselves onto a ferry to cross a body of water, bikes being first on and first off, of course. A small payment is taken for this privilege. Soon after we find ourselves riding beside an 'N' road (possibly the equivalent of a UK 'A' road) but here the road always comes with a fietspad on one or both sides. These are not our favourite roads since the traffic noise is constant and this can be exhausting on a hot day but every so often there will be a roundabout which, like all others here, will completely segregate the cars from the bikes and clearly mark this with the red tarmac. Sometimes, but not always, cars must give way to cyclists but whichever way it works the road markings always make it very clear who has priority.

On arriving in Friesland we suddenly find ourselves at the smallest ever ferry, suitable only for about four bikes and a few passengers. We ring a large bell to attract his attention then the ferryman pulls on a cable stretched across the river to move his tiny raft slowly to our side.

As we glide from one fietspad to another on our trip we have noticed small signs with green numbers on, which clearly relate to a unique cycle path mapping system used here. Eventually we were pointed to a phone app called Fietsknoop and when we started using this for navigation we suddenly found ourselves moving between numbered 'nodes' on paths that deliberately avoided busy roads. We were sent down tree-lined avenues, along paths across farmland, on twisting paths through dense woodland, skimming along the top of a dyke, even along narrow paths at the back of a row of houses which involved bouncing over tiny bridges, going anywhere in fact where cars were discouraged. Sometimes the route signing is difficult to follow but the pay-off is a quiet, cycle-friendly world whose mission is to make things better for cyclists. Just when we thought we had experienced everything about cycling here this new world arrives.

It is not, of course, all plain sailing. Sometimes even cyclists must wait at a bridge to allow a boat to come through beneath.

Arriving in Friesland in the north of Holland we are beginning to feel blessed that we have not had to deal with any more rain showers. The exceptional heat has gone, being replaced by a cool breeze from the north which requires greater use of our bikes' electric power as we head into it.

Then, for the first time, we catch a glimpse of the Ijsselmeer, a huge body of water captured by the Dutch as part of their never ending plans to protect their low-lying country from the sea. Houses built on the land side of the dykes are clearly below the level of the water on the other side but life just goes on here as if this is of no concern. At Stavoren we take a ferry across the Ijsselmeer to avoid cycling across one of the long bridges that traverse it. Encountering a headwind on either of these would mean living with it for twenty kilometres, not our idea of fun at all.

So we casually ride onto the ship along with a handful of other cyclists, one of whom has a trailer carrying a small child, and we admire the view for the eighty minute crossing to Enkhuisen.

This brings us onto a long peninsula with the town of Den Helder at its northern tip, a place where we plan to pause again and brush off some of the hordes of mayflies that have plagued us for the last couple of days.